Just a small sample of all the amazing practicing that took place over Winter Break!

If your child filled out a countdown worksheet, take a picture and send it to silvermusic@silvermusic.org! We’ll add it to our blog!

In working with a Book 3 cello student recently, I realized that preparing for a recital is a lot like baking a cake!  Let me explain:

When you bake a cake, after you measure each ingredient and mix them together according to the recipe, it is time to bake the cake.  The cake may need to bake for about an hour, so you set your timer for 50 minutes and pop it in the oven.  When the timer rings after 50 minutes, you insert a toothpick or a fork into the middle of the cake, and it comes out a little sticky with batter—the cake still needs more time to bake!  You put the cake back in the oven and set the timer for 5 more minutes.  This time there is less sticking to the fork, but you can tell that the cake still needs more time as the fork is not totally clean.  At this point you are so excited for the cake to finally be done that you stay near the oven to take the cake out right when the buzzer goes off again after five more minutes.  This time the top of the cake is shiny and springy, and the fork comes out totally clean–the cake is DONE!

Even though you would love to dig in to the cake right away, it still needs to cool for a while and then finally be iced for an extra layer of scrumptiousness!

So how is baking a cake like preparing for a recital?  Well, after we learn all of the notes and bowings of a piece by heart, there is still a lot to work needed on the polishing of the piece, such as dynamics, phrasing, character, and beautiful tone.  It also takes a while for the piece to settle into your fingers and be really comfortable and fun to play.  While you are polishing this piece, you are most likely beginning to learn a new piece as well with new challenges to master.

While you are working on a piece, it is almost like you are baking it like a cake in the oven.  As it gets more and more comfortable to play, it is close to being baked through and almost ready to come out of the oven, or be performed for an audience.  Sometimes when you try to perform a piece that is not baked all the way through, some of it may fall apart or get mixed up, just like a cake may be too soft and runny on the inside if you take it out before it has baked the right amount of time.

One of my students has worked hard to learn a new Book 3 piece over the past few weeks and was eager to play it on a recital in place of the Book 2 review piece that we had decided would most likely be her recital piece. Even though she could play all of the notes correctly in the new piece, we could both tell that this piece needed more time to become totally “baked” with dynamics, phrasing, etc. for a great recital experience.  The Book 2 piece flowed right out of her with only one small hesitation.  She knew immediately that this piece was much more performance-ready for the coming week’s recital–it was fully baked and just needed a bit more icing to make it totally delicious!

There have been many times that my students have asked to play their newest piece on a recital, and I have almost always said they need to play a more comfortable review piece instead. The audience will enjoy hearing any piece that you play, that you can really play fluently and musically EVEN (and especially!) if it not your most advanced piece!  I always say that I would rather hear an absolutely beautiful Twinkle on a recital than a more difficult piece that is not polished and ready to play with joy and ease 🙂  And I myself would rather perform a piece I know very well, that is really in my fingers and in my head, than I piece I have just mastered.

Happy baking and playing!

Perhaps the biggest thing that sets Suzuki training apart from “traditional” methods is the focus on review. As Shinichi Suzuki said, “ability is built on review”. While other methods use technical exercises and etude books to hone students’ skills, the Suzuki method allows students to build their ability through pieces of music. As students learn more and more pieces, though it can be tricky to keep all of that music under the fingers and in the mind and ear. And once a review pieces slip out of a student’s repertoire, it can be painful and time consuming to bring it back. One great way to make sure every review piece is played every week is by using a review schedule or chart. Below is a picture of our violin student Jesse’s review chart. We were inspired to see he keeps it with his music books and even had it at his lesson, and so allowed us to snap a picture!

Do you have a great way to keep review going? We’d love to hear it! (Or see it!)

As your child advances in the repertoire and in their ability, their pieces quickly get more and more complicated. Your role as a practice partner changes from a hands on helper to that of an advisor. Understanding practice as an exercise in problem solving and being able to offer your child some ideas on how to solve their challenges will help you increase the productivity of each practice session.

The key to productive and efficient practice is Unit Practice. Suzuki students begin their studies with unit practice—the rhythms that each student practices on single notes and open strings, “I like Chocolate Ice Cream”, etc., are “units” that are practiced separately for months, even after they have been strung together to build a student’s first Twinkle.

All pieces, no matter their length or level, are made up of such building blocks, and it is up to the advancing student (with help from the parent) to find the relevant units, take them out of the context of the piece, and practice them in a variety of creative ways to build ability and ease. Below are just a few ways that good practicers manipulate units. Your teachers are always happy to offer you more!

• Building backwards
  • Most sections of a piece that your teacher assigns can be broken down even further when practicing. After finding the units that make up a section, pick the last one and master that, then attach the second to last unit, third to last, etc., so that as the student practices, they are constantly going from less familiar to more familiar and reinforcing the material they just learned.
  • e.g., take the triplets in the last line of Witches’ Dance and practice only the last three notes of the piece, then the last six, last nine, etc. (Word of warning to string players–make sure you whether you are on an up or down bow when you start in the middle of a passage!)

• Using Rhythms to Promote Dexterity
  • Our fingers are not equal in strength and dexterity which can make playing fast passages evenly a struggle. One way to fix this is to play the passage with different rhythms in order to build speed and strength in to the fingers. Just make sure to always play the passage evenly right after!
  • e.g., for a group of four sixteenth notes, play long-short-long-short, then short-long-short-long, then evenly. This is “rhythm + opposite + straight”. The student can play an entire passage of sixteenth notes (maybe 2 or 3 lines) in this way.

• Separate the hands
  • For string players, difficult passages often consist of a particularly tricky right hand technique, or left hand technique, or in very tricky passages, both at the same time! Practicing a difficult right hand technique on open strings, or a difficult left hand technique with slow, separate bows, is a great way to isolate and address challenges.
  • Pianists will also benefit from separating the hands to isolate and address the different challenges between right and left.

Undoubtedly your teachers have instructed you in these practice techniques for various passages, but as the pieces grow in length and difficulty, you and your child will benefit enormously from taking ownership of the process of devising practice strategies and putting them into effect. Besides from increasing your child’s ability, turning practicing into a critical thinking exercise may even give you the added benefit of a more engaged and enthusiastic practicer! Let us know how it goes, and we’d love to hear any other unit practicing tips that work well for your child.